Humans use natural language, vision, and con- text to resolve referents in their environment. While some situated reference resolution is triv- ial, ambiguous cases arise when the language is underspecified or there are multiple candidate referents. This study investigates how prag- matic modulators external to the linguistic con- tent are critical for the correct interpretation of referents in these scenarios. In particular, we demonstrate in a human subjects experiment how the social norms applicable in the given context influence the interpretation of referring expressions. Additionally, we highlight how current coreference tools in natural language processing fail to handle these ambiguous cases. We also briefly discuss the implications of this work for assistive robots which will routinely need to resolve referents in their environment.
@inproceedings{abramsscheutz2022naacl,
title={Social Norms Guide Reference Resolution},
author={Abrams, Mitchell and Scheutz, Matthias},
year={2022},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies},
pages={1--11}
url={https://hrilab.tufts.edu/publications/abramsscheutz2022naacl.pdf}
}